AI Seminar sponsored by Fortive

Ankur Handa -- DexPilot: Vision Based Teleoperation of Dexterous Robotic Hand-Arm System

Abstract: Teleoperation offers the possibility of imparting robotic systems with sophisticated reasoning skills, intuition, and creativity to perform tasks. However, current teleoperation solutions for high degree-of-actuation (DoA), multi-fingered robots are generally cost-prohibitive, while low-cost offerings usually provide reduced degrees of control. Herein, a low-cost, vision based teleoperation system, DexPilot, was developed that allows for complete control over the full 23 DoA robotic system by merely observing the bare human hand. DexPilot enables operators to carry out a variety of complex manipulation tasks that go beyond simple pick-and-place operations. This allows for collection of high dimensional, multi-modality, state-action data that can be leveraged in the future to learn sensorimotor policies for challenging manipulation tasks. The system performance was measured through speed and reliability metrics across two human demonstrators on a variety of tasks. Here is the link to the project.

Bio: Ankur Handa is currently a Research Scientist at NVIDIA Seattle Robotics group led by Dieter Fox. Prior to that he was a Research Scientist at OpenAI and before that he was a Dyson Fellow at Imperial College London. He finished his PhD with Prof. Andrew Davison at Imperial College London and did a two year post-doc with Prof. Roberto Cipolla at the University of Cambridge. His papers have won Best Industry Paper Award at BMVC, 2014 and have been Best Manipulation Paper Award Finalist and Best Student Paper Award Finalist at ICRA 2019.